Fact Check

Did Hillary Clinton Meet With the Manchester Bomber's Father?

A real picture with a false caption is being used to spread misinformation about the former Secretary of State on social media.

Published May 30, 2017

 (Flickr/World Bank Photo Collection)
Image Via Flickr/World Bank Photo Collection
Claim:
A photograph shows Hillary Clinton shaking hands with Ramadan Abedi, the father of Manchester bomber Salman Abedi.

In May 2017, a meme spread widely on social media, purporting to show former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meeting and shaking hands with Ramadan Abedi, the father of Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi.

That is not what this photo shows. In fact, this is a photo of Clinton shaking hands with Mohamed Magariaf, who was then President of Libya, during a meeting in New York on 24 September 2012.

Don Emmert of Getty Images took the picture, which has the following caption in the Getty Images library:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) meets with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf on September 24, 2012 at a hotel in New York.

An official State Department photo from the same meeting corroborates the date and venue of the photo, and the identity of the man standing alongside Clinton.

The falsely captioned version, which has been shared thousands of times on Facebook, features the url www.o4a.org, which redirects to Overpasses for America, a web site known for publishing inflammatory content.

This isn't the first time Hillary Clinton has been the target of fake photo-related claims. In 2015, a photoshopped image of Clinton purportedly posing with Osama Bin Laden went viral; in October 2016, a 1966 photo of two topless women walking down the street was falsely captioned as showing Clinton with her college roommate.

Dan Mac Guill is a former writer for Snopes.